Life Science

Life Science. Oh how I adored Life Science. I was a seventh grader at T.W. Browne Jr. High and had Coach Rachel for my Life Science teacher. Now the mere fact that I can remember his name tells you something about him and his class. I loved nothing more than to study for his tests. I would spend hours in our front living room memorizing all the answers I would need to ace his tests. Then I would walk up and down the hilly streets of my neighborhood with my other best friend who coincidentally was named Susan, too. She was a year older and we both took our academics very seriously. Susan would faithfully quiz me time and time again over the material. I took great pride in always being the first one done and nine times out of ten making a perfect score. In fact, Mr. Rachel commented one time about how he had told his wife that he was going to make the test a little harder to see if he could beat me. He never was able to do it. I just took on the challenge. I was the Life Science champion. I also took great pleasure in putting together my insect collection. To this day I still remember that dragon flies belong to the Odonata family and grasshoppers to Othroptra. My other memory of this class was sitting next to Kathy Duff who was left handed and I was right handed. We were constantly bumping elbows. As smart as I was in test taking, it never occurred to me that Kathy and I should just switch places at our table to solve our problem. Two years later I would once again have Mr. Rachel for Honors Biology. It was here that the lyrics for "Put Your Hand in the Fin of the Shark From Biology" were crafted during our shark dissection.

Put your hand in the fin of the shark that swam the waters

Put your hand in the fin of the shark that swam the sea

Take a look at a shark and you can look at tuna differently

By putting your hand in the fin of the shark from Biology.

Every time I look at the gooey gook

I wanna tremble

Fake Fingernails

Fake fingernails. Oh how I loved fake fingernails. My own pitiful excuse for nails were usually bitten down to the quick. In fact it wasn't until the summer before my junior year of high school that I actually grew out my nails. I couldn't have been more proud or mortified when during my first day of typing Mrs. Tucker informed us that we all needed to cut our nails in order to type properly. But flash back a few years and let's continue the fake fingernail story. Each week I received $2.00 for my allowance. I would more times than not rush to M.E. Moses at Westcliff Mall and plunk down 50 cents on a set of fingernails. They would be applied with adhesive from a small tube included in the box. I would faithfully apply them and polish them and watch them pop off one by one. Now their lack of longevity never kept me from spending my next week's allowance on a new set. When I think what I could have done with the compounding interest of a weekly deposit on fingernails I'd be rich today!

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia. Don't you love the way it just rolls off your tongue? It seemed so exotic, so foreign, so I can't wait to make the vacant lot next door the place of my dreams. When I moved to Texas I was in sixth grade. The same sixth grade I was in when I left Florida. But the difference between the two was night and day. I was eleven going on twelve and everyone else was eleven going on sixteen. I hadn't been at my new school more than an hour or two when a boy from my class wrote me a note asking me to go steady with him. Now I really had very little knowledge of this whole steady thing, but my mother found it highly inappropriate and said no way. I always blamed this event as the kiss of death on my junior high/ high school love life. Basically all going steady meant in sixth grade was wearing some boys id bracelet. Once the word got out that my mom wouldn't let me go steady no one else ever asked. So what does all of this have to do with a magical place called Czechoslovakia? Well while others my age were falling madly in love and going steady, I was busy climbing to the top of the mountain next door to gather pea gravel to bring home for dinner. Or I was crushing chalk rock into fine powder to be baked for our weekly bread. Life in Czechoslovakia was hard and required constant attention. It was here that I met my soon to be new best friend Susan. Susan was overweight and to be honest I had not met many kids my age who were overweight. My first thought was that I did not want a fat friend. But want it or not we became fast friends and continued to be for several more years. Myself and the neighborhood kids all played in that vacant lot until they had the audacity to build a house in Czechoslovakia. By that time I was ready to move onto bigger and better things like plays and carnivals. But that's a whole other story.